We touch our smartphones around 2,617 times a day, according to new research which found that phone screen time was 2.5 hours for the average user, and 3.75 hours for the heavy user.

For the study, research firm dscout in the US recruited a demographically diverse sample of 94 Android users from a pool of more than 100,000 participants.

Then they built a supplementary smartphone tool to track every user’s interaction across 5 days, 24 hours a day.

Researchers found that people tapped, swiped and clicked a whopping 2,617 times each day, on average.

For the heaviest users – the top 10 per cent – average interactions doubled to 5,427 touches a day, researchers said.

Per year, that is nearly 1 million touches on average – and 2 million for the less restrained people, they said.

The study found that phone screen time was 2.42 hours for the average user, and 3.75 hours for the heavy user.

That was time spent on everything from typing texts, swiping on Tinder, turning Kindle pages, and scrolling in Facebook.

The average user engaged in 76 separate phone sessions a day.

Heavy users (the top 10 per cent) averaged 132 sessions a day.

The findings showed that long usage sessions are rare – mostly Netflix and reading.

In general, people prefer lots of little sessions with breaks in between.

Researchers found that activity drops (but far from disappears) in the predawn hours.

At 7 AM, touches explode, ramping up almost continuously until dinner time.

Over the course of our five-day study, 87 per cent of participants checked their phones at least once between midnight and 5 AM, researchers said.

Messaging and social media apps totalled 26 per cent and 22 per cent of interactions respectively, while internet search browsers comprised 10 per cent, they said.

Facebook had the most number of touches at 15 per cent, followed by native messaging at 11 per cent, home screen at nine per cent and chrome at five per cent.

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